


Stains

by Toxic_Waste



Category: Iconoclasts (Video Game)
Genre: Are Really Obvious Here, Consequences of Indoctrination, Gen, Trauma, identity crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-29 23:01:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21418105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toxic_Waste/pseuds/Toxic_Waste
Summary: Just doing the right thing isn't always enough to keep the vomit down.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	Stains

Ivory trickles down the wrench handle.

It burns when it leaks onto her fingers, still frozen around the grip as if in death.

Droplets of divine viscera drip down her face, each one branding itself onto her skin, affixing itself into her memory forever.

A growing puddle of the caustic white fluid oozes around her boots, staining the scuffed rubber a sickly shade of gray that turns her stomach.

Acrid smoke drifts through the air, and tears leak from her eyes even though she can’t find the strength to move. The rocket launcher clattered to the ground with a massive thud that sent rumbling echoes through the platform and through her soul.

Even as she stares, she’s expecting the popping, the healing, the indestructibility that’s an eternal hallmark of those blessed by He.

Her knees shake, and she isn’t even sure if the gathering silence around the corpse is better or worse.

_It’s the right thing to do_, she tells herself. She doesn’t need to convince herself of it. It’s self-evident by this point. It’s the whole reason she’s _here_ in the first place.

The corpse of her would-be killer writhes its way through her eyes and into her brain. The massive tree exploded from its guts stand in defiance, a gaudy monument to her actions. She feels like retching.

She’s not sure if it was even human.

But it was _alive_.

It longer stands in her way. The threats are gone. The rocket launcher lies still and silent. The mechanical arms only spark as their charge is leeched out by the spilt Ivory.

Her brother’s family, her brother’s health, their father… all stand avenged.

They’re all still dead.

And now another corpse numbers among them.

Penance looms ever larger behind her, and the end of world itself somehow seems less of an impending threat.

_It was the only way_, she tells herself. She doesn’t need to convince herself of it. Those rockets had her name on them, those craters in the ground around them were supposed to be filled with _her_ organs, these walls were supposed to be painted in _her_ blood.

And to some extent, they are.

She slides a hand under her vest, feeling the sickly warm wet that now molders beneath her clothes.

Such is the fate of any mortal who purports to place themselves on equal footing with the agents of the divine – the agents of _He_.

But it is not her blood puddled on the floor, and it is not her corpse that lies cooling in a pool of its own entrails.

She, bound by the mortal coil, stood up to those powered by the blessings of the ineffable He, gifted with such powers as to boggle the mind and break the body. The incorruptible, infallible, immortal agents of the One Concern, of the Great Tri, of He Himself.

She comes away victorious.

Her stomach is still churning. She swallows hard against the bile rising in her throat and burning her tongue.

They’re one step closer to victory.

She doesn’t regret what she has done.

Elro was right.

Her brother always warned her of what the world might contain, the world beyond the safe, friendly borders of Settlement Seventeen. He encouraged her, at times. Helped her in evading and subverting the will of the One Concern.

But he had warned her. And she had known anyway. Penance was swift and sure, never missing and never wrong in it’s target.

(Or was it?)

She sees now, with her own eyes. She sees it all. She sees death, visited by her own hand, even upon the most holy and least deserving. Is this His will? Was any of this in His plan? What _is_ He? What is _any _of this?

Long habit and form gives her answers to these, of course. The sermons she has heard through her life do provide _answers…_ but they are not answers she likes.

They are not the answers she seeks.

She doesn’t regret what she has done.

Her fingers curl and uncurl from the wrench as she hefts it up from the ground. A distant wind whistles through the grating of the rocket gantry they stand upon. Ivory leaks from her boots and leaves footprints behind her as she turns away.

More than a divine agent has died this day.


End file.
